Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Right in Other Ways: Hierarchical vs. Radiant Intelligence Models

Jake Casella

Other intelligences are what made me fall in love with science
fiction—really different, new, unusual creatures and characters.
These different kinds of thinking beings—superhumans, robots,
aliens—are a central feature in a lot of SF/F. What I'm hoping to
show today is two ways of thinking about that intelligence. I'm going
to call the one way the “Chained” model, after the Great Chain of
Being, and the other way the “Radiant” model, which has a more
diverse and pluralistic approach. The “Chained” model intersects
with Cartesian Dualism, so we'll look at that as well—both tend to
disembody intelligence, with some unfortunate consequences.

As a kind of framing
thought here, I like looking at science fiction and these ideas as a
two-way street. On the one hand, these ideas are pulled from
elsewhere in society. But on the other hand, fleshing out abstract
ideas in stories gives them a lot of weight in society, more than
they might have had as dry theory. That's great when it makes
difficult concepts comprehensible, or scary new ideas less so—but
it's troublesome when it allows problematic ideas to live past their
expiration date.

The Great Chain

So to dive right in:
the “Great Chain of Being”. This is a very particular and
ordered concept of the universe, a ranking of all the beings that
exist. You probably know how this works: we've got God at the top,
then angels, humans, animals, plants, and rocks and nonliving matter
at the bottom.

This idea was
formulated by the Greek philosophers, most notably Aristotle, and
then taken up again and expanded on by Medieval Christian theorists.
The Great Chain concept becomes extremely prominent again in Western
European thought in the 17th & 18th centuries, and it has left
many traces that are still with us today.

You can see just
looking at the Great Chain that there are some problematic
implications, especially if you take the stance that lower orders
exist to serve the higher ones. In that case it becomes a rich source
of classism, sexism, racism, and let's not forget speciesism. It
works really well to preserve inequality—because it posits the
“natural order” as inherently good; yet also justifies
exploitation of groups defined as “lower” on the chain. In this
context, the idea's centrality to slave-reliant Greek society, feudal
Christianity, and colonial/imperial Europe makes a lot of sense.

As the sciences
developed, the Great Chain model was rejected—the modern tree of
life decenters humans as thoroughly as Copernicus did in the solar
system. Unfortunately, Great Chainish thinking has persisted, and has
frequently been misapplied to evolutionary concepts; science fiction
has been really bad at repeating and popularizing some of these
misconceptions.

Placing
all possible intellectual development along a single track from low
to high is a clear Great Chainish move, and it dramatically limits
the kinds of intelligence we can imagine. Less intelligent species
are dismissed as savages, possibly noble ones, but not equals, while
equally intelligent species are functionally humans in different
bodies, with no truly radical differences.

However,
science fiction is very uncomfortable around the idea of superior
intelligence—by Great Chainish thinking, they should be our ethical
and practical superiors—so most of the time when you see a
“superhuman intelligence” you also get some kind of narrative
device to minimize or contain that threat.

Most
commonly, superhuman intelligence is demonized and dehumanized—think
of Wells' Martians, “minds vast and cool and unsympathetic”, or
pretty much every robot uprising narrative—cold, unfeeling AI
hunting us down.

The
Singularity can also be seen as a Chainish strategy. One thing that
inspired this talk is an essay Jo Walton wrote a couple years back,
where she complains that the entrenched idea of the Singularity has
made people “afraid to write the kind of SF that I like
best, the kind with aliens and spaceships and planets and more tech
than we have but not unimaginable incomprehensible tech”. The
Singularity is often invoked to avoid confronting superhuman
intelligence by just making it “too mysterious”. Its Great
Chainishness is also clearly visible in its religious framing of
“machine gods” and “the rapture of the nerds”, and the idea
that it's this foreordained endpoint that technology is evolving
towards.

Vernor Vinge
coined the term Singularity, and then created his “Zones of
Thought” novels essentially so he could duck the issue (and I
should mention that he does some interesting work with cognitive
diversity in those). But note the clear resemblance to the Great
Chain here, albeit in more dimensions.

As
a final note here, when you compress the infinitely-graded Great
Chain to just a few steps (lower, same, higher), you can easily move
to a binary that's just “us and them”, “the same and the
other”. My favorite example of this is in Orson Scott Card's Ender
books, where he explicitly lays out and uses a “hierarchy of
foreignness”, the important categories of which are “raman” and
“varelse”. Raman are persons, intelligences, that we can
communicate with, although they might not be human in shape. Varelse
are beings who might be intelligent, but they're not like us, we
can't really communicate with them. And despite a lot of
complications in Card's ethical debates that we can't explore right
now, his conclusion seems to be that war with varelse is inevitable.

Dualism

Cartesian Dualism is the idea that minds are radically different than
bodies—that there are really two kinds of substance in the
universe, mental stuff and physical stuff. Three points to make about
this idea: it's logically/theoretically wrong, contradicted by all empirical studies of the mind, and has a number of distinctly negative impacts on our society.

The most blatant place we see Dualism in genre fiction is in the
continued use of souls—immaterial minds—as valid plot points.
Science fiction is as guilty of this as fantasy, though the souls may
be dressed up in pseudo-scientific language. We see the immaterial
mind at work in unproblematic “personality backup” technologies
beloved of many SF writers today, and in the all-but-obligatory
Freaky Friday episodes of televised SF, where the characters' minds
switch bodies.

The Great Chain privileges our angelic/spiritual side over the
base/animal, and in a very similar move, Dualism privileges
Mind/Logic over Body/Emotions. (And incidentally is echoed in the
cyberpunk disdain for “the meat” and reverence for the
virtual/digital.) This thinking is directly involved in major and
ongoing social problems:

Sexism: dualism is heavily involved in some aspects of sexism, particularly the false binary that associates men with the mind and women with the body.

Mental/Bodily Health: by treating mental health as “less real” than more clearly physiological medicine, we've got ourselves into a pretty terrible spot on both counts.

Animal Cruelty: dualism has generally denied—or made it easier to deny—that animals have consciousness, contributing to our massive, systematic disregard for animal rights.

Religion: way too big to get into in the context of this paper. Short version: many problems caused by religion are directly or indirectly related to dualism.

Two Cultures Divide: dualism created a deep gulf between the sciences & the humanities in academic culture, which is unfortunate for everbody

Anti-Intellectualism: and finally and curiously, there's an odd mutation of dualism that winds up creating anti-intellectual stereotypes.

Much as Great Chainish narratives find ways to minimize superior
classes of being, Dualism provides a way to minimize intelligent
individuals. In a word: Spock. By flipping the Dualist order around,
and making emotions—bodily feelings—more concrete, real, or
important than abstract “thoughts” and “logic”, we restore to
primacy the “normal intelligence” of the “normal human”. The
cold/rational/gifted characters are relegated to side-kicks or
villains, constantly setting up and reinforcing this false dichotomy
of logic and emotion. These narratives further an incorrect, dualist
conception of intelligence and emotion, while also providing potent
anti-intellectual tropes.

SF also propagates a Dualist notion called “the Zombic Hunch”--the
disturbing idea that a seemingly intelligent being actually has no
consciousness inside. Zombie variants like “the Chinese Room” and
“Mary the Color Scientist” continue to color our discussion of
non-human intelligences—the ideas frequently crop up in Robert
Charles Wilson's & Peter Watts' work, and in SF/F about robotic
or insectoid intelligence. The “Mary” pseudo-argument recently
cameo'd in the film “Ex Machina”.

The Great Chain limits cognitive diversity in SF by making
intelligence very linear and hierarchical. Dualism misconstrues
intelligence as separate from the body. Both models have the effect
of disembodying cognition—privileging an abstract “spirit” or
“mind”--and one result of this is an inability to conceive of
radical alterity, of really different minds.

Poul Anderson's “Brain Wave” is a kind of classic SF novel about
intelligence—everyone on Earth has their IQ raised exponentially
due to a cosmic phenomenon; and it has this kind of sad and hollow
passage that really epitomizes the idea of mind I'm criticizing here.
A couple of the super-genius characters are out scouting for alien
life, and they realize that they won't find anybody really DIFFERENT
from themselves, just less intelligent races (who humans won't
interact with as equals) or identically super-genius races: “After
all, pure logical mind is so protean, and the merely physical will
become so unimportant to us, that we'll doubtless find those beings to be just like ourselves—whatever their bodies resemble.”

Real Difference

So
having laid out a few ways that speculative fiction helps keep the Great Chain & Dualism alive in popular thinking, and how those
concepts affect the creation of and attitude towards fictional
intelligences, I want to briefly gesture towards a few strategies and
writers that are departing from those concepts—what I called
“Radiant” cognitive models.

A
number of authors have been inspired by modern cognitive science,
which often reveals facts stranger than fiction: current research
informs neurodiverse humans, post-humans, and AI in the work of Greg
Egan and Peter Watts, for example, while Kim Stanley Robinson's
“2312” engages a great range of cognitive diversity in a highly
pluralistic society, and is also noteworthy for its treatment of animal intelligence.

Another
route to cognitive diversity focuses on cultural difference, a
frutiful strategy of many feminist SF texts. Elgin's “Native
Tongue” trilogy uses a woman's language to escape patriarchal
constraints; Le Guin's “Hainish” species, though slightly
biologically different, are most distinguished by their varying
anthropological and political structures; the Mattapoisett society in
Piercy's “Woman on the Edge of Time” has achieved a kind of
emancipatory utopia through careful social engineering.

My
favorite sub-genre of SF is the really alien aliens. Not just
different biologies, but richly diverse in culture, in motivation, in
psychology. In how they think! There are a number of writers who do
this well; C.J. Cherryh, who frequently portrays aliens in ways that
contradict the Great Chain and Dualist ways of thinking, can provide
a few examples.

In
her “Chanur” novels, she introduces us to seven wildly different
alien species, some of whom can't even communicate directly. An
interesting point—and one that opposes Card's stance on varelse—is
the idea of caution and non-aggression in direct correlation to how
little another species is mutually comprehensible—or as Pyanfar
puts it, “Gods and thunders, you don't pick a fight with something
you can't talk with!” The series is rife with characters of
different species second-guessing themselves, trying to understand
each other, trying to deceive each other, trying not to accidentally
deceive each other by stepping into each others' blind spots. A moral
that is repeated throughout is the the virtue of not trusting
one's gut, not trusting that intuitions honed on one set of
evolutionary experiences will adequately explain a different set.

In
Cherryh's difficult but rewarding early novel, “Hunter of Worlds”,
that point is very bluntly made: “instinct is not always positive
for survival when you are offworld.” “Hunter” examines and to
some extent deconstructs the idea of a superior, Spock-like
intelligence in the form of the alien iduve; one of the things that
makes the novel so difficult is how far from generic conventions it
ultimately strays—the iduve really are practically superior to
humans, which leaves us in a very uncomfortable spot. In “Hunter”
as well as in her “Foreigner” series, Cherryh also repeatedly
rejects the trope of teaching aliens human values—her human
characters learn at their peril that other species have their own
identities and emotions.

Conclusion

That's just a rough,
very quick sketch of some works that are breaking from
Chainish/Dualist depictions of cognition, what I'm calling the
“Radiant” approach. In sketching out the problem of Great
Chainish & Dualist models in SF, I'm hoping to encourage more
critical engagement with these concepts. It's disturbing to see the
Great Chain & Dualism reinforced through science fiction,
especially at a time when anti-intellectual or anti-scientific biases
are such major factors in our society.

But! As I hope I've
at least indicated, there are countervailing traditions that pull on
more realistic conceptions of embodied minds, and it's in these works
that I find—not only the most inspiring speculations, but the
characters who most deeply fulfill that desire to meet strange new
beings. Other intelligences. Thank you.

Referenced & Related Literature

The Great Chain of Being:

“The
Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea” by Arthur Lovejoy

Dualism & Cognitive Science:

“Discourse
on the Method”, “Principles of Philosophy”, & the
“Meditations” by Rene Descartes

“Descartes”
by Georges Dicker

“Sweet
Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness” by
Daniel Dennett

“Philosophy
in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western
Thought” by George Lakoff & Jacob Johnson